Friday, April 22, 2016

Colin Barrett's first book, the collection of short stories,
Young Skins, won the Frank O’Connor
International Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Rooney
Prize for Irish Literature. I commented on my
favorite story in the collection on this blog when the book first came out in
America, but I did not really care for the other stories. Barrett's
characters--mostly men—are uneducated, drink, shoot pool, screw around, and do
drugs. I have no objections to any of
those aspects of life as the subject of fiction, but they do tend to get flat
and tedious after a time.

What bothers me most about Barrett's most recent story,
"Anhedonia, Here I come" in The
New Yorker, April 18, is the language—not the language of the dialogue, but
the language of the narrator, whosever he is.

The action of the story recounts the journey of a man named
Bobby to buy some marijuana from his young female supplier. Bobby is a poet, so
he says, although we don't have any evidence of the nature or quality of his
poetry. At a pub he discovers that a man he has been trying to get to publish
his first book of poetry has already published a collection by someone
else. Bobby goes home depressed and
tries to light a joint with a cigarette lighter in his apartment building which
is filled with gas from a leak. What
happens then is anyone's guess, if anyone cares.

"If you get the language, the story follows, and inYoung
Skins the language flowed out of the concept of the
town, somehow. What’s a vernacular, a dialect? It is language, weathered and
textured and defined by time and geography, the same way a wind-eroded
mountainside or a listing, flaking fence post is. I follow the language back to
the mouth out of which it is being spoken.

What I look for in sentences is a gnarl, a knuckliness. It’s textural,
like a striae or a burr, some embedded trace within the sentence where the
register changes or shifts. It’s hard to explain, of course, because it sounds
like damage of a kind, but it has to be the right kind of damage, and it may be
visual or mental as much as it is aural. Sound in prose is important, but it is
not everything. I like a sentence that does exactly what it needs to, just not
in the way one would have thought it needed to do it. I like a sentence that
booby traps its cadence if required. I like sentences that go on, and ones that
end before you think.

The kind of writing I don’t like is the stuff I call lethally competent.
Language that takes no chances, that seeks to efface itself as language, as a
material, and offer the clear windowpane on reality, et cetera. The kind of
prose a review might call pellucid, or limpid. Pellucid, limpid is the biggest
insult there is, to me. In every genus of art, the stuff that has lasted has
made a demand."

The following is a definition of Anhedonia from Medinenet.com

"Anhedonia:Loss of
the capacity to experience pleasure. The inability to gain pleasure from
normally pleasurable experiences. Anhedonia is a core clinical feature of
depression, schizophrenia, and some other mental illnesses. An anhedonic mother
finds no joy from playing with her baby. An anhedonic football fan is not
excited when his team wins. An anhedonic teenager feels no pleasure from
passing the driving test. "Anhedonia" is derived from the Greek
"a-" (without) "hedone" (pleasure, delight). Other words
derived from "hedone" include hedonism (a philosophy that emphasizes
pleasure as the main aim of life), hedonist (a pleasure-seeker), and
hedonophobia (an excessive and persistent fear of pleasure).

In the New Yorker
"This Week in Fiction" blog, Barrett says this about anhedonia.

"If Bobby is
to some degree self-aware, he is still dunderingly oblivious in many respects.
He thinks he’s sincere but deep down worries he’s a fake. Even though he’s a
malign grotesque, there is, I think, that poignant core to him. How do you know
you really love the things you think you do? That your concept of self is
sincere? The question, despite his own virulent assertions otherwise, is
whether Bobby had, or is, succumbing to a state of anhedonia."

If you look up "Anhedonia," you might want to look
up some of the words in the following sentences from Barrett's story:

"one hand broodingly ensconced within a pocket"

"no noise but the late-night dysphagic groans of the
elevator's recurringly jammed doors"

"Bobby's peregrinations tended to bring him, as now,
into intermittent contact with this body of water"

"He noted the tarry density of its bilious murk"

"[He] took a spumous dump in a toilet cubicle"

"he felt that every other poetic topic of concern was
an obfuscation, an eschewal, or a bald retreat from this theme"

"Bobby's psychic sturdiness was, he feared, a
manifestation of a submerged but profound and pullating narcissism."

"He picked his nose, unseated a gratifyingly intact
clump of dried matter, palpated it between his fingers, and flicked it
away."

"Then he realized he was abandoning an infant to a
vehicle under the operation of a man kneading tinctures of a patently illicit substance
into his face.."

"Bobby could feel himself, in her spectral, incipiently
canonical gaze, being transubtaniated, molecule by molecule, into
obscurity."

I have not found many talking about this story online, but one
reader, a man named Dan on GoodReads says:

This is, potentially, the worst short story ever written. It’s bad, it’s
dreadful, it’s poorly written, it has no point, it’s not clever. This story is
so bad it is an insult to the man who chopped down the tree that was turned
into the paper the story was printed on. This story is so terrible the woman
who drives the truck that delivers the printing ink to the New Yorker is
considering holding the next shipment hostage until the editors apologize
personally to her and her family for their incompetence. She works too hard,
puts up with too much traffic and back pain to waste her time allowing the
staff at the short story department of the New Yorker to waste all that ink on
something this bad.

(And he goes on for another five paragraphs)

This is a bit
extreme, it seems to me.

However, it just is not clear why Barrett uses the
language that he does in this story. It
does nothing to encourage the reader to identify or sympathize with the central
character. Indeed, it does nothing but draw attention to itself and irritate
the reader—at least this reader.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Perhaps mistakingly, I took the pompous language of the (omniscient?) narrator as an attempt to replicate the thoughts of the story’s central character, Bobby, and his obvious insecurities as a person (“He’d been smitten with the concept of suicidal ideation since a teen-ager”), as well as his obvious self-doubts as a would-be poet. In that light, I found Bobby and his quest for “anhedonia” somewhat comical-- and felt no little sympathy for the guy and his story. Yes, he story seems largely meaningless, but that’s probably way Bobby (and the author) intended to be-- or so I told myself. After all, meaning runs the risk of giving pleasure. :)

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."